The induction last week of this year’s nominees into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame covered an important part of Native civil rights history — and highlighted Wrangell’s place in that history.

Now in its 17th year, the Hall of Fame inducted two women who had lived in Wrangell and were related, but the nonprofit organization that runs the program said it was coincidence that they were selected in the same year. They had been nominated separately.

Tillie Paul-Tamaree in 1922 helped lead a successful challenge to establish the right of Alaska Natives to vote, same as their white neighbors. The case started on voting day that November when Charles Jones, a Tlingit elder and the seventh Chief Shakes, was denied the right to vote at the polling place in Wrangell.

Jones later ran into Paul-Tamaree, who accompanied him back to the polling place where she talked with election workers who changed their mind and allowed Jones to vote. But the government thought otherwise about letting Natives vote and charged Jones and Paul-Tamaree with crimes.

The next year, a jury in Ketchikan voted not guilty and the judge dismissed the charges. Though the case encouraged more Natives to vote, it took years for territorial legislators to back it up with changes in law. Yet if not for Paul-Tamaree and her courageous stand in Wrangell 103 years ago, it might have taken even longer.

She was inducted into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame on Oct. 21, as was her great-granddaughter, Joaqlin Estus, who moved as a teenager in the late 1960s to Wrangell where her father, Paul Estus, served a short stint as editor of the Wrangell Sentinel.

She later moved to Juneau, where she worked at KTOO, Juneau’s public radio station, helping to start up the first programs in Southeast Alaska focused solely on Native issues. She later worked as communications director at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and, in 2023, helped assemble historical records to convince the national Presbyterian Church to apologize for its racist actions against Walter Soboleff, a Tlingít minister, whose church had been torn down.

Estus, who now lives in Anchorage, is one of the primary organizers of the Sharing Our Knowledge Conference in Southeast Alaska, bringing academics, researchers and Alaska Natives together for a week of cross-cultural learning.

Certainly proud of her great-grandmother, Estus said: “She was a civil rights leader in the early 20th century,” and it was an honor to be inducted into the Hall of Fame at the same time as Paul-Tamaree.

And it is an honor for Wrangell that two women who worked so hard to assert and communicate Native rights and heritage are recognized with the same award. A coincidence on the same day, but well deserved.